Eban Charges Russia with Resumption of Shipments of Arms to Egypt and Syria

Yugoslavia and India, backed by 12 other United Nations members, many of them Moslem states, pressed in the emergency special session of the General Assembly here today for a vote tomorrow on a draft resolution calling upon Israel immediately to withdraw all its forces behind the armistice lines established it 1949 between Israel and the Arab countries. In the Assembly as well as later at a general press conference, Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba Eban denounced the 14-power draft sharply as “a prescription for hostility.”

The draft resolution, Mr. Eban said, would destroy the Israel-Arab situation to the prewar conditions, “inviting belligerency and renewed war.” The draft, he said, “would abandon all objectivity and obstruct all hope of any possibility for a peaceful dialogue.”

At the press conference, Mr. Eban also accused the Soviet Government of “intensive shipments” of arms to Egypt and to Syria. He said that there have been very intensive air lifts to Egypt and Syria, including Antonov aircraft and fighting planes as well as a very considerable supply of tanks and artillery. Pointing out that the Soviet Union was a member of the Security Council which has primary responsibility for the maintenance of peace and security. Mr. Eban charged that “in the broader context of the Assembly’s current debate of the Middle East crisis, the Soviet Union was violating the spirit toward peace which should motivate the Assembly.”

Mr. Eban also discussed the status of “unified Jerusalem,” declaring that the “administrative legislation” regarding Jerusalem voted yesterday by the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, “contained no new political statement.” That legislation, he said, “concerned itself exclusively with the urgent necessities of repairing the ravages and the dislocations arising from the division of the city’s life and from the hostilities which Jordan inflicted upon it.”

He declared that “insufficient attention has been given to the enactment of legislation for the preservation of holy places from desecration which imposed heavy penalties for violation of their sanctity and immunity.”